Weekly Report
February 5, 2016
The Office of Planning and Assessment reports its weekly activities and contributions toward Texas Tech
University’s institutional effectiveness efforts.
OUTCOME 1: Texas Tech will be found in compliance with all external accrediting agencies and State
of Texas mandates
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The IE Handbook is complete, and has been sent to Carlene Kelly for uploading to the
The agenda for the next SSL IE Committee is going through final revisions. The short-term plan for
the committee is outlined below and will soon establish long-term procedures:
o This spring, the committee will focus on rubric training followed by reviewing the 15-16
outcomes and assessment methods for SSL units (through May 2016).
o A REDCap survey will open in June with a deadline of September 1.
o During this time, OPA will meet with departments to discuss changes before they submit 16-17
information in the survey.
o Fall 2016, the committee will review 15-16 results and actions for improvement and 16-17
outcomes and assessment methods, followed by meetings to discuss improvements.
A documentation table has been prepared using the Fall 2015 core curriculum in-course assessment
rubric results for courses that have submitted their results. An analysis will be prepared and
entered into the Core Curriculum TracDat account after results are received from the following
courses: ANSC, ANTH, ARCH, ART, ARTH, ASTR, ATMO, BIOL, CFAS, CHE, CHEM, CLAS, CMLL, COMS,
ECO, ENGL, ENGR, ENVM, FREN, GEOG, GERM, HDFS, HIST, HONS, LARC, MCOM, NRM, NS, PHIL,
PHYS, POLS, PSS, RUSN, SLAV, SOC, SW, VPA, WS, and ZOOL.
The Provost has initiated an Ad Hoc Committee for Academic Engagement. An OPA staff member
will sit on the committee in an ex-officio role and will provide assessment-related feedback.
DigitalMeasures Activity:
Number of Records Added and Edited in the Last...
(Number of
Logins)
8 Hours
1 Day
2 Days
Activities
Database 161
485
1,035
University
(115,578)
•
1 Week
1 Month
6 Months
1 Year
5,010
36,451
57,454
75,991
Quality Enhancement Plan: Communicating In a Global Society Weekly Update:
o OPA received the T number from Human Resources. This will allow the position to be posted.
Significant “behind the scenes” work in BrassRing has helped the position description to move
forward for final approval.
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OUTCOME 2: The Office of Planning and Assessment will contribute to the Office of the Provost’s
institutional planning processes
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The Writing Skills module of CAAP concluded on February 4th. Booklets and scantrons are being
examined to identify any forms that need to be voided from the final scoring. Writing Skills materials
will be shipped back to ACT next week and organization for the Mathematics module, which begins
February 16th, will begin.
OPA presented the 2014 Faculty published works, creative works, and presentation for the
upcoming Strategic Plan Report. This information will ultimately go to the Chancellor and BOR.
Six students have started their electronic portfolio in Chalk & Wire and 23 artifacts have been
uploaded. This is a significant increase from the previous few weeks and seems to indicate that
activity will continue to increase. Further participation will occur once 18 students in ENVE 1100 will
be given extra credit this semester for uploading a research paper to their iPortfolio. This course has
a number of students from the pilot group. Now that there are a number of artifacts and the
likelihood of more soon, OPA is developing the assessment process. This report will include more
information about the iPortfolio contest. A separate report on this process will be provided soon.
In preparation for the second year of the pilot, OPA met with Angela Mariani Smith and Sarai Brinker
of the Music Department to discuss their involvement. They have targeted MUSI 1300 and are
beginning a draft Table of Contents and rubrics. This course will go through Blackboard to access
Chalk & Wire.
OPA participated in a conference call with IT, IR, the System, and Ellucian to discuss the
implementation of the Ellucian Perform solution. OPA will work with this team to identify, modify,
and provide required TracDat deliverables.
OPA staff developed a draft document describing institutional student learning outcomes and their
use for assessing the core curriculum. This document was sent to Genevieve Durham-DeCesaro for
her review and feedback.
OPA staff developed a National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) crosswalk document to map
the assessment of core objectives to items on the NSSE.
OUTCOME 3: The Office of Planning and Assessment will continually monitor the university’s
compliance with laws, policy statements, and policies deriving from the State of Texas, THECB, and
SACSCOC
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Results have been released from an 11-year study tracking 8th grade Texas students through FY
2014. This shows that of 324,316 students enrolled in the 8th grade in 2004, by 2014 65,920 (or
20%) had earned a higher education degree or certificate. This can be further broken down to
demonstrate that females (24%) are completing higher education at higher rates than males (17%)
and “not economically disadvantaged” students (30%) are finishing degrees much more frequently
than “economically disadvantaged” students (10%).
A Lower-Division Academic Course Guide Manual has been published with changes effective for Fall
2016. This is the official list of approved courses for general academic transfer to public universities
that may be offered for state funding by public community and technical colleges in Texas.
THECBs Office of Student Financial Aid Programs published their report Texas Grant Program: Fiscal
Years 2012-2014. This report is required annually by the Texas Legislature to update the TEXAS
Grant program for the last three preceding state fiscal years (currently 2012, 2013, and 2014). The
report includes the following:
o TEXAS Grant allocations by eligible institution, disaggregated by initial and subsequent award
o TEXAS Grant recipients disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and expected family contribution (EFC);
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Race/ethnicity and estimated family contribution distributions of initial recipients in FY2015 who
entered the TEXAS Grant Program (1) based on meeting the Priority Model criteria and (2) based
on the program’s basic initial award eligibility requirements;
o Each institution’s reliance on the Priority Model; and
o Persistence, retention, and graduation rates of TEXAS Grant recipients.
Policy Alert – OPA staff monitor higher education policies in order to better inform our institutional
effectiveness methods. The national Completion Agenda, which is focused on promoting our
nation’s goal to increase the number of students who complete degrees, certificates, and other
credentials, is focused on creating pathways for degree completion. The following completion
activities are active within the state of Texas: Achieving the Dream, Adult College Completion
Network, Complete College America, Complete to Compete, and Project Win-Win.
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OUTCOME 4: Texas Tech University faculty and staff will be well-prepared to meet OPA’s faculty
credentialing, assessment, and strategic plan expectations
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OPA sent out 52 individual HB 2504 notices to Chairs of departments that had outstanding syllabi
that needed to be uploaded.
One of the responsibilities of the administrator of DigitalMeasures and Faculty Credentialing is to
monitor the Public Access to Course Information (PACI) Webpage mandated by HB 2504. TTU IT has
a script set up to automatically upload and replace syllabi for each course. Reports from several
faculty regarding their syllabi not being available on PACI in a timely manner prompted reporting
that information to Daniel East our contact in TTU IT on Friday, January 29th. After looking in the DM
documentation, it was discovered that even though IT was running the Schema Backup daily, the
data was only being refreshed on a weekly basis. The fix, a script change to pull the data from other
DM web services, was implemented on February 2nd and so far the data feed looks stable again.
The Program Evaluation Rubric Review is nearly complete. It was requested last week to revise the
reports to provide more direction for the programs. The revisions should be complete early next
week. OPA is already preparing to schedule individual consultations with program coordinators.
Additionally, an Executive Summary is under final review and will be available early next week.
In preparation for coordinators to enter 15-16 data, OPA has begun offering TracDat training
sessions in the TLPDC. There were two full sessions this week with more to follow.
In addition to direct contributions toward the departmental goals, OPA continues to focus on continuous
improvement measures.
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OPA has completed the spring newsletter. An email to select individuals across the campus about
the newsletter will go out next week. However, it is currently available online at
https://www.depts.ttu.edu/opa/newsletters/newsletters.php.
The Humanities Center has designed an Introduction to Humanities course that they would like to
propose as a required course for all undergraduates. OPA will work with Don Lavigne from the
Humanities Center and IT to do a study to determine how well students that currently take the
course do relative to the general student population. We will meet next week to discuss
methodology and IRB submission.
OPA is making preparations to administer a faculty survey for supplemental data for the PPI. This
plan is still in development. More will be reported in the coming weeks.
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